By way of background, a centerfire cartridge includes a case or casing that holds the powder (or propellant). A primer is inserted in a primer pocket of the casing, and a bullet (the projectile) is inserted into a neck of the casing. A casing can be handloaded by an individual to make a cartridge, and a used casing can be reloaded to make a cartridge. Often, a cartridge is inaccurately referred to as a bullet.
Casings, new or used, are typically cleaned and polished in a device such as a vibratory tumbler containing cleaning media. The cleaning media needs to be separated from the casings after the cleaning process. Such separation is typically accomplished with a media sifter, which is well known in the art of reloading ammunition. Such sifters can be as simple as a pan with holes in the bottom into which the casings and cleaning media are poured after cleaning/polishing. The holes allow the media to flow out of the pan into a bucket or the like. However, with this type of simple sifter, the casings will generally have media left in them, requiring that each casing be handled to turn the neck down to allow any contained media to flow out. One such pan is frustoconical, allowing a very large surface area for pouring the casings and media into and a smaller bottom to direct the outflow of the separated media. Another popular type of media sifter is a rotating drum. The drum is mounted to a housing having a separated media collection bottom portion. The housing may also have a removable lid for mounting on the bottom. The housing holds a removable drum that is separable into two halves. One half of the drum is removed or moved relative to the other half, exposing an open top on the other half into which the media and casings are poured. Both drum halves contain numerous holes through which separated media flows into the housing bottom. After the media and casings are poured into a bottom drum half, the top drum half is positioned over the bottom half and held in place. A crank arm is provided to allow the user to rotate the drum about a center axis to help effect separation of the media from the casings.